Month / January 2017

by Roslyn

A murder and a mutant

I woke up the other day to see this:

A little closer:

Those aren’t leaves covering the trees – they’re crows! There must have been a few thousand of them (the picture only shows part of the flock, which extended to cover several other trees and rooftops). This is the third time this winter that I’ve seen a mega-roost in downtown Ottawa. Each time it has been on days that are much colder than usual. By noon, the flock had dispersed.

We had more bird encounters in Quebec last week where we saw a partial albino black-capped chickadee:

Here’s a black-capped chickadee with regular plumage, for comparison:

In domestic birds, partial albino (pied) mutations are recessive and fairly rare. It took about 100 years of cockatiel breeding before the pied mutation was established in the US, in 1951. I can’t find published numbers for chickadees, but bird banders counting mourning doves have recorded only 1 partial albino among 10,749 individuals. So this was probably a pretty rare bird! And here’s Ada, no longer impressed by a regular old chickadee:

by Roslyn

Learning to science

From Alison Gopnik’s The Gardener and the Carpenter:

Imagine if we taught baseball the way we teach science. Until they were twelve, children would read about baseball technique and history, and occasionally hear inspirational stories of the great baseball players. They would fill out quizzes about baseball rules. College undergraduates might be allowed, under strict supervision, to reproduce famous historic baseball plays. But only in the second or third year of graduate school, would they, at last, actually get to play a game.